“The only certainty that engineers have is that people will use this technology (5G) in a way they could never imagine.” This statement is from Professor Luciano Leonel Mendes, coordinator of 5G and 6G research at the National Telecommunications Institute (Inatel). He is Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in the Telecommunications and Telematics areas from Unicamp and he believes that “we have not even scratched the tip of the iceberg, 5G is not actually ready yet”. Professor Luciano has been studying the subject since 2013 and, in this interview, he talks about the challenges of technological innovation, the patent trollers issue, and what to expect from the new generation (6G) and warns: “the metaverse is not a matter of avatar, it is a concept that involves much more than a representative entity in a virtual environment”.
Professor Luciano, you have a doctorate degree in electrical engineering, you are a specialist in telecommunications and a researcher in the digital communication area. There is a growing area of novelty in its use, such as the metaverse, and very dependent on technological innovation. One of your most recent articles talks about 6G technology. What is the difference between 5G and 6G? What are the untapped possibilities of 5G?
Answer: When we talk about mobile technology, we have a decade-long space between research and commercial implementation. Historically, that’s how it’s happening. I started studying 5G in 2013 and we are seeing the implementation in 2022, it is nine years apart. We are starting to study 6G now to be implemented in 2030, 2035. It is a system that will meet the demands of non-current society, but those that will arise with the advancement of technology in the next ten years.
But we have already realized that there are some gaps present in fifth generation (5G) technology that is inherent in the revolution it is causing. If we look at the history of mobile communications, the first generation brought personal communication, it was the first time that it was possible to call someone instead of calling somewhere, but the technology was low and the demand was huge, which generated prohibitive prices. Then came the second generation to solve these issues and there was the digitization of the system. So, the prices fell and mobile technology became popular. The third generation brought the cell phone with the internet, but then the navigation was very poor, and the experience was far below that you had on the desktop or laptop. Then came the fourth generation to solve these problems and transformed the experience to the point that you have the smartphone as the main tool for accessing the internet. Now the fifth generation is bringing a series of services, such as the internet of things, integration with machines, and reduction of latency that will allow a series of new services. But they are very innovative, we do not yet know how they will behave. So, we understand that it will need to have a sixth generation for us to be able to sediment these services with sufficient quality for these new uses.
The evolution of technological generations:
1G: it brought personal communication
2G: scanning and SMS
3G: videocalls and internet
4G: speed and stability of the internet connection
5G: digital integration and the Internet of Things.
6G: beyond communication (or simply a big question mark “?”)
The sixth generation will be born naturally due to this demand for service improvements that are very visionary. In addition, the sixth generation is being developed to be something beyond communication, it is being developed to be a tool that is in fact an integration between the physical, virtual and biological worlds so that you can be immersed in the network going beyond an interface with the screen. Today you need to rub your finger on the screen to be integrated, which is very limiting for human function. We want to bring new meanings to this network. The possibility of touching a hologram and feeling the texture, temperature, and other senses of what you are touching. In addition, it improves the possibility of remotely controlling machinery in places of difficult access and danger and increases the experience on the metaverse.
What is the metaverse for you? What needs to happen to become a reality and what would be the impact for companies?
Answer: This is a concept that people associate with a virtual environment, basically is that you have your representative entity in a virtual environment and can make interactions in that environment. But the concept of the metaverse involves much more than that. You need to have a full immersion of the physical world with the virtual, mapping several parameters that go far beyond you controlling an avatar. The network needs to be aware of the situation around you, what these things are done, what situation you are immersed in, and take this information to others. In addition, there is biological integration, not just where you are, but what you are. Monitoring of health, your parameters, and your reaction to certain experiences. That way you can better understand what you like and what’s important to you. This integration between the three worlds is what will make the metaverse come true. It’s not just about the avatar.
The biggest players in the market are interested in this novelty and we will see great advances happening with the technology of communication, sensing and mapping need to evolve so that the metaverse can happen. And then the issue of 6G comes in because it will be in this environment that it will be developed.
In this expansion of the reality foreseen by 6G, what would be the risks and opportunities for society? With everything connected, there would be no danger of anything like cyberattacks on bank accounts, or health systems?
Answer: I will go back a little to the past, in the 1940s, 1950s, when we perceive an interesting behavior of scientists. At that time, a great deal of research was done in the area of nuclear energy that culminated in one of the greatest tragedies of humanity, which were the explosions of atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After that, science came to be seen no longer with a purist vision, but as something that would have nefarious military ends. Science tried to armor itself with the idea that science alone has no application, that this task would later fall to politicians and the leaders of society would decide what to do with this technology. The idea was that science evolves by itself and the application of this evolution happens in the absence of science.
We see that now too. We are talking about the evolution of communication in absentia of what its applications will be where scientists are seeking the state of the art and the development to the maximum potential of technology for the benefit of society, and it will make use of it in the most appropriate way. That’s the speech. But the concern is inherent in technical discussions because there are many dangers. Telecommunications involve the world and dictate rules of behavior, inventing new alphabets, through messaging applications, and we realize the power of technology in the formation of society.
Imagine that you have in your body some equipment that can measure your reactions, for example, a smartwatch that can measure blood oxygenation, heartbeat, frequency change, etc. I’m on the same company’s computer as the watch looking at things in the company’s browser. Then a car advertisement appears. At this point my heart rate goes up, my pupil dilates… These things connect and can become a very dangerous trap because the system can capture its biological reaction to advertisements and then it is possible to create tools that can arouse interest to the point of becoming irresistible for the consumer to buy some product. The human being will become a piece where buttons are pressed, and if they are pressed correctly, the purchase decision becomes automatic. You end up a puppet! Imagine the next step, where you can monitor hormones, the quality of your blood capable of making early diagnoses, how your adrenaline is when exposed to certain ads, which emotions you demonstrate when reacting to a certain song, in such a way that you can be directed to act to buy products by manipulating your emotions because the ad is irresistible. The network knows that.
We have security considerations. We’re changing a little bit from the vision of the 1940s, 1950s. Now it is discussed how this information will be used, what are the applications, and what the limits are.
An article by his co-authorship talks about various applications for 5G. It’s certainly very specific to our reader, but the question is: have we explored the full potential of 5G? What can we still advance in this technology? What are the untapped possibilities of 5G?
Answer: We didn’t even scratch the tip of the iceberg. 5G isn’t really ready yet. It’s a technology that’s evolving. The first version came in 2018, the second version in 2020, is about to come out a third version in 2022 and each of them adding new features. We are far from understanding what are the limits of 5G on issues of use and benefits to society. We’re far away from reaching our potential. In Brazil, specifically, we are talking about sub 6 giga Hertz (GHz), where the frequency 3.5 is the most famous, but we also have the auction that happened recently and the operators do not know how to do it; we have the issue of the operation of latency to make the 5G network a reference in industry 4.0; we have the issue of control of autonomous cars as a tool in the mobility process; we will still have the issue of the internet of things that will still arise the standard in 2022. This is the first time we can imagine 5G arriving in farming and also in companies. The only certainty that engineers have is that people will use this technology in a way they could never imagine.
In the last issue of this magazine, we had an article on essential patents and how Brazil was not prepared for 5G technology exactly because it was not prepared for these patents. In your opinion, what is the biggest tech bottleneck for Brazil?
Answer: Essentially these essential patents affect manufacturers or smartphones or infrastructure, they are essential patents to implement the functionality of the standard. Brazil, by itself, is not in this market. It takes place outside the country in parts of Europe, Asia, and the United States. There are several essential patents and companies self-declare that they have certain patents that are essential to the standard. That is, the definition is a self-declaration of the company. I saw a survey that found about 28,000 essential patents that fall under this definition of self-declaration. Then a manual investigation was made, and it was found that less than 10% were actually used according to the standard[1]. In Brazil, we will be a little on the sidelines of this discussion. If anyone wants to venture, they will face a monstrous job. Even if it is at the level of 10%, rounding off 3,000 families of essential patents, it will have to go in search of the holders of these patents.
Even with essential patents, is there still market segmentation, when technologies only communicate with each other?
Answer: When you adhere to a pattern, the intercom has to happen. The standard exists for this: allowing diverse implementations to be compatible. For example, a company has a phone that works by bluetooth. What happens is the market reserve for extra features. The headset works by bluetooth with competing devices, but the active noise cancelation only works if it is connected to a smartphone of the same brand. So, you create an ecosystem of your own. Apple does it very well. It ends up becoming a tech prison to keep you up to date with tech from the same brand. This goes against the pattern, which was created to avoid this.
When you look back at the beginning of mobile telephony, there was a country pattern: the Japanese cell phone only spoke with Japanese, the American only with American, within Europe idem. There was a clear market reserve in the first generation (1G). Here in Brazil too, when there was segmentation within operators and states. You bought a cell phone in São Paulo, went to Minas Gerais and couldn’t talk because the standards were different. It was an extremely curious thing. In the third generation came this concern of patents essential to have communication worldwide. But it didn’t work out well. We had several variations of 3G. We just had a real standard unification in 4G. And this is what guarantees economies of scale, where you manufacture a chip that can be used worldwide. So, we live in a curious situation where technology seeks unification using standards, while manufacturers develop ecosystems to ensure market reserve. This reservation is no longer territorial, but for brand loyalty. From a technological point of view, the search is for standardization, not segmentation.
Essential patents are those that protect inventions whose uses are necessary for a given technological standard to be implemented. Furthermore, patents are rights granted by the State to individuals as a way of rewarding and encouraging investments and efforts made to develop a new technology. So, do you consider that the protection of essential patents generates pro-competitive effects that benefit consumers?
Answer: At first, not to the benefit of the consumer. It benefits technological evolution. In the long run, you can even put this form of benefit to the consumer who, without incentives to technology, could not use modern products. But to think immediately that you need to remunerate the patent holder and the commercial exploiter of the patent generates a burden that will be taken to the final price of the product. Therefore, the consumer pays more for the product. The cost of implementing a system ends up being higher by making use of a product that uses the knowledge of a person or company, which ends up raising the price. If we didn’t, it would be cheaper. But in the long run, it’s bad because without that cost there would be no incentive at all. Without patent protection, we would live in technological stagnation. Technological evolution depends on the patent because it is often the patent that finances research. Without the revenue from royalties, companies would not be able to invest. The question is complicated, and the answer is not simple. It would be different if we considered technological stagnation acceptable, which is not the case. The economy itself needs technological evolution.
How to deal with the patent right of essential technology, which can effectively define who will compete in the market?
Answer: That’s the big question. First, we must define what is essential. Self-declaration leads to an infinite snowball. First, you need to define what is an essential patent or not. Then you do a process to check which patents are actually used because there is a division and the essential patents do not apply to the whole.
The essential facilities doctrine, which was born in the United States of America, is applied by analogy to essential patents. In this sense, it has been established that those who hold essential patents are required to license them under fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory conditions (these conditions are usually referred to as FRAND – Fair, Reasonable and Non-discriminatory). Do you understand that this system, because it has subjective criteria, can open room for discussion, for example, how to determine what is a fair licensing condition? How to determine what is reasonable?
Answer: The model has worked well. Companies come to an agreement when there is the use of some essential patent whose royalty is not being remunerated. We realize that it converges very quickly, there are few cases in which they arrive in the media. When there is inequality in trading conditions, they soon come to light. If a company trades condition X from one technology to one company, it cannot trade 3X conditions to another. It shall have the same criteria. If the patent is really essential, there is no longer the right to choose to enter the market, because if it is not using it, it does not enter. Hence it is important to negotiate reasonable values to sustain the business. I am not an expert in the legal world, but I believe that in the judicial sphere these issues arise. Therefore, reasonable conditions are established in the commercial relations between the companies themselves. From an objective point of view, it is difficult to define what is reasonable and fair. But I believe it is working, given the entry of new operators into the market.
The licensing of essential patents cannot constitute any burden that unbalances the patent holder/licensee relationship, falling only on the patent holder. So, what should be the means that brings a balance so that the patent owner is adequately compensated for the result achieved by him?
Answer: I have never thought about this question. What if there was a balance that did not burden manufacturers so much and adequately remunerate the patent holder? The matter is far more complex. What I realize and what is not very connected to the question is a performance in the market that seems to me quite bad about the so-called patent trollers, companies that go hunting patents throughout the world and then manage to map where they are being used and start suing everyone. There is a wave of lawsuits from these companies that buy secondary patents, not so innovative, but which are in some ways used. These companies, which have nothing to do with the development of the patent, with the innovation itself, buy these rights and start suing everyone. This seems to me to be quite proprietary and the patent market allows it to happen. It seems like blackmail around the world around this practice. These “blackmailing” companies do not use royalties to develop new technologies. Sounds like a negative flow to me. Although I do not answer your question, I think this current model allows this practice and I consider it bad. I don’t see it as a proper approach.
How is professional training in Brazil compared to other international markets? Are we competitive in an increasingly global market?
Answer: The exact sciences go through a worldwide problem that is the lack of public interest. People enjoy the benefits that exact sciences bring, but the number of people interested in contributing to this advancement is decreasing. This challenge is not only in Brazil, not only in Inatel. It is a challenge to encourage young people to be interested in the study that leads to these developments, more specifically in the processes of mathematics and physics, which are the basis of engineering. If you compare Unicamp’s candidate-vacancy ratio, for example, which is one of the best and most disputed engineering schools in the country, in the mid-1990s with now, you will see that significantly decreases the interest of young people to enter these courses. We hope to reverse this deficit so that we can implement 6G and 7G technology to our satisfaction.
Candidate/vacancy ratio at Unicamp in the space of 25 years
| Course | 1996 | 2021 |
| Production Engineering | 33.7 | 7.6 |
| Telecommunications Engineering | 8.6 | 2.8 |
| Electrical Engineering | 19.3 | 5.6 |
Inatel has a series of technology training courses. What is the main differential of the institute in the face of the challenges that are approaching, such as 5G, metaverse, IoT?
Answer: We, from Inatel, have a very great concern about the quality of the professionals we deliver to the market. At Inatel we are concerned with looking at what the needs of the market really are and preparing our curriculum so that these demands are met, so that our engineers can arrive at playing the game within the companies and not have to learn the rules of that market, in an internal internship or training. This is one of the greatest advantages of Inatel to act in an integrated way in the market to solve the problems of companies. Inatel has many partnerships with universities in Europe (Germany and Spain) and the United States, promoting exchanges among students. We realize that seriousness in our educational demands is an important role in understanding which technologies are relevant for the future. We seek to insert in the students this entrepreneurial mindset, of how to make the most of this knowledge and this technology, being able to create their own business or undertake within the company, adding value in their actions and thinking outside the box. In this way, we perceive the effectiveness of students and alumni in the labor market.
How do you see Intellectual Property in promoting national innovation? How can it add to the training of new innovation professionals? What bridge can and should be created to increase Brazil’s innovative potential?
Answer: It is relevant to recognize the intellectual effort of the people behind the process. Understand that these people invest an intense amount of time, and ideas do not fall from the sky. It takes study, investment, and dedication for a truly innovative technology to emerge. It is necessary to understand that these royalties are the main fuel of innovation and that is where we take the effort to continue contributing to solving the problems that are increasingly difficult.
People must think a little more about ways to make use of this technology more fairly and beneficially. It is necessary to involve society more, not just companies and scientists, avoiding the condition of exploitation of patents in a parasitic way: does not create, buys from those who create, and blackmails those who produce. This is something that we could eliminate from the process to cheapen the product to the final consumer because the manufacturer is never at a loss.
It is important to mention that technological evolution is a continuous process, which works practically like a river. It must run constantly in order to irrigate technological growth. This issue of us already researching the 6G network is essential for the country. In the past we didn’t have this river running, we tried to meet the river halfway. We imported technology and knowledge and tried to design solutions for something that was created for another scenario. With this, we reached sad results, such as the total disconnection of our farming. The agricultural sector suffers greatly from the lack of information, with the lack of connectivity. There is a lack of awareness that this “technological river” is a continuous flow. This is now being circumvented with 6G technology, with a pioneering program in Brazil in the area of telecommunications, doing coordinated research countrywide.